Disable Win Key in Windows

I find it most convenient to use Windows by connecting to it from my Linux box using rdesktop. BTW, Microsoft (or whoever invented it) has done a great job with RDP. It's orders of magnitude faster than VNC.

In Linux (I run Sawfish as my window manager) I'm using Win+TAB to switch to the previously visited workspace. This is very handy if you want to temporarily go to some workspace, do something quick then return to where you were.

(This feature, by the way, is not present by default in Sawfish, but it was quite easy to code it in Lisp. I just love all this power.)

And now the intrigue: when I use Win+TAB to switch back to a workspace holding my Windows remote desktop, Windows would popup the Start Menu, stealing the focus from what was currently running (usually IE). I can't say how annoying this was.

So I decided to fix it. Found an Wikipedia page about it that points to the official solution on the Microsoft website. The proposed solution looks verrrry simple:

Click Start, click Run, type regedt32, and then click OK.

On the Windows menu, click HKEY_LOCAL_ MACHINE on Local Machine.

Click the System\CurrentControlSet\Control folder, and then double-click the Keyboard Layout folder.

On the Edit menu, click Add Value, type in Scancode Map, click REG_BINARY as the Data Type, and then click OK.

Type 00000000000000000300000000005BE000005CE000000000 in the Data field, and then click OK.

Close the Registry Editor and restart the computer.

Nice. Let's hack it in, I thought. So I proceed to open the registry editor, lookup the folder, create the new key. Since it's binary, you can't edit it in place—it opens a popup dialog allowing you to type the binary data. Got that? TYPE, not PASTE. Paste doesn't work in that crappy editor.

Ohh, all this user friendliness! Isn't Windows cool?

After thinking for 2 seconds, I decided not to type those digits manually and look for something else. And I found it. It's a software called "WinKey" that helps you do that in 2 clicks, no restart needed.